Clinton's 'Next Generation' Push for a Better Net

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Clinton's 'Next Generation' Push for a Better Net

Washington cyberheads are holding their breath as President Clinton prepares to ask Congress for US$100 million annually to help develop a faster, less crowded Internet. White House insiders admit the reception in Congress may be cool, at best.

Why? The laser-focus of Congress this spring will be on balancing the federal budget (now $107 billion in the red) so political sentiment for any new programs, particularly those aimed at long-term research, will probably be very mixed - even though the "Internet II" project is one of Vice President Al Gore's favorites.

White House Net evangelist Tom Kalil, in a recent interview, admitted that the Clinton administration will "have to work hard to make a strong economic case" for its umbrella project for new technology development - including Internet II - called the Next Generation Internet Initiative. Kalil, the administration's director of Science and Technology, said the White House will argue that $100 million a year "is a very small amount of money" compared to the estimated $250 billion created by the Internet in today's economy. White House political strategists also will try to reverse what Kalil calls "an inadequate appreciation sometimes of the role that government research has historically played" to trigger creative new businesses.

Participating research universities would each kick in $500,000 annually to help fund the new network, Kalil said. Last fall, 34 universities, including Stanford and Harvard, asked the administration to help them build a new Internet. The first goal of the White House initiative, says Kalil, is to get 100 universities connected at 100 times the speed, and a small number of sites at 1,000 times the current Net speed.

The second goal is to promote investment in networking technology to allow 100 times more devices attached to the network "so that it's not just humans talking to humans but machines talking to other machines over the Internet." The third goal will be to set up what Kalil calls "co-laboratories" - places in cyberspace where researchers and their databases around the world can interact as easily as if they were all located in the same building.

What all that adds up to, Kalil says, is new research going on at "hyperspeed" compared to today. "Not only would that benefit all users of the existing Internet, he said, "it will help keep America competitive in the next century."

"This is not like some of the older networking initiatives, where this was pure government money doing research and universities didn't have to put up any money. This Internet II is an entirely different concept," said Scott Bradner, technical support manager at Harvard University. "The government would help an individual institution connect to a new high-performance backbone but the institutions would still pay for that backbone. This government money wouldn't connect Harvard to Cornell. It would help connect Harvard to the new network and Cornell to the new network but the government wouldn't be building a general purpose data network. It would be for development of a high-performance research network only."

But critics aren't convinced - yet. Republican sources in the Senate say Clinton's pre-election announcement of his quest for a new Internet seemed a bit rushed, its sole purpose perhaps to score last-minute election points. Kalil acknowledges there's still some argument over the details of Internet II and Next Generation Internet. But Kalil is adamant about what the new plan is not.

"We're not interested in setting up a special initiative out of the White House to fund essentially commodity research," he says. "We want to help universities build architecture that would allow them to separate the high-end research traffic that needs high bandwidth and quality service from the commodity traffic you can get from an Internet service provider. We're talking about making it possible to let some subset of the research community look at the future. That's really different than anything anyone's ever done before."